Spiritual Cinema
"Movies containing spiritual, metaphysical, conscious or similar messages or themes".
Simon Keyes explains the idea behind Spiritual Cinema.
It is the extraordinary power of cinema, high or low, serious and exploitative, to move and disturb us that we should celebrate and embrace in all its diversity. Films can fertilise our inner lives and provide a counter-balance to that compartmentalisation of our "religious" selves that Thomas Merton dubbed our "personal holiness project". The feelings and shadows that films (well, perhaps not quite every movie) incarnate in us give us privileged access to the world beyond our immediate experience. The sights and sounds of cinema can resonate in the realms of the unconscious and the archetypal like no other medium, and there is much for us to learn about ourselves in this experience.
Below is a list of "the best of" this genre...
Mulholland Drive (2001)
8/10
Director: David Lynch
Starring: Justin Theroux, Naomi Watts, Ann Miller, Laura Harring, Robert Forster, Dan Heda...
David Lynch pulls out all the stops, upends all expectations, and, well, goes all Lynchian in this maniacal, mind-bending mix of Hollywood satire, fil... Read more
Network (1976)
8.1/10
Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty
A savage satire written by Paddy Chayefsky, looking at the powers behind television programming. Even more compelling and relevant today than when it... Read more
Nostalgia ( aka Nostalghia ) (1983)
8.2/10
Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Oleg Yankovsky, Domiziana Giordano
A homesick Russian poet, researching in Italy with the aid of a beautiful interpreter, arrives at a Tuscan spa and is set a challenging task by the lo... Read more
Novitiate (2017)
6.6/10
Director: Maggie Betts
Starring: Melissa Leo, Julianne Nicholson, Dianna Agron, Morgan Saylor, Maddie Hasson, Mar...
A 17-year-old trains to become a nun as the Roman Catholic Church undergoes radical changes in the early 1960s Read more
Of Gods and Men (2010)
7.2/10
Director: Xavier Beauvois
Starring: Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale
Trappist monks living in Algeria find their Catholic faith tested to the limit after a revolution takes place and the government urges them to abandon... Read more
One: The Movie (2006)
7.5/10
Director: Ward Powers
Starring: Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Robert Thurman, etc ...
A cinematic journey in search of the answer to life's ultimate question. Armed with only a mail-order video camera, a list of twenty questions and a d... Read more
Ordet (1954)
8.2/10
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer
Starring: Henrik Malberg, Emil Hass Christensen
A tale of miraculous resurrection brought about by human love, Carl Dreyer's Ordet is an extraordinary expression of spiritual optimism without being... Read more
Pilgrimage (2017)
5.8/10
Director: Brendan Muldowney
Starring: John Lynch, Richard Armitage, Jon Bernthal, Tom Holland
In the 13th century, Irish monks embark on a reluctant pilgrimage to escort their monastery's holiest relic to Rome. Their mission soon becomes fraugh... Read more
Places In The Heart (1984)
7.3/10
Director: Robert Benton
Starring: Sally Field, Lindsay Crouse, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan
Against a Depression-torn background in Waxahachi, Texas, Sally Field struggles against incredible hardships. With fine performances by John Malkovich... Read more
Pleasantville (1998)
7.5/10
Director: Gary Ross
Starring: J T Walsh, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen, Reese Witherspoon, Tobey Maguire, William H...
A kind of "Wizard of Oz" in reverse as two 1990's teenagers become trapped in the golly-gee suburban fantasy world of a 1950's sitcom, where everythin... Read more